


I, Rodney

by Epiphanyx7



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robot, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2007-11-26
Updated: 2007-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-01 01:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Epiphanyx7/pseuds/Epiphanyx7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is the military commander of the lost city of Atlantis. Rodney is a robot. (No, really.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I, Rodney

**Author's Note:**

> Not really serious. Not really romance, either. But, still. John. And Rodney.

The room was dark, naturally. John stepped into it, thinking the door closed behind him. He stood for a moment in the pitch-black, taking deep breaths. Sooner or later, someone would find him – and then, it would be back to the hellish work, work, work, doing paperwork and then going out and attempting to find just a little bit more food, because otherwise they were all going to starve.

 

There were times, when he wished he’d never agreed to come on the Atlantis mission. It wasn’t all bad – Ford was a good kid, for the most part, although really, he never should be allowed to name anything, anything at all, ever – and Teyla was cool, too, and so were those bantos sticks she used to beat the crap out of him. John had never been able to stay away from women who could beat the crap out of him. If he was Superman, then Kryptonite would wear a tight shirt and kick his ass in less than three minutes.

 

Atlantis itself, of course, was awesome. John reached out and laid a hand on the console beside the door, and the city hummed happily for him. Most of the others on this mission had no idea what he was talking about – but Carson had nodded thoughtfully and said “Yes, yes.” So John knew he wasn’t crazy. Atlantis hummed, usually, and she sometimes whispered, occasionally she purred. John knew, in the back of his mind, that if they had a ZPM… That Czech scientist with the crazy hair had practically drooled at the thought of the ancient power source… that Atlantis would be able to sing.

 

The city shivered in delight at the very thought, and then all the lights in the room turned on.

 

John shrieked like a girl – no, no, that was a manly, manly exclamation of surprise – and then blinked, eyes streaming, at the suddenly well-lit room.

 

The walls were white, the ceiling was white, the floor was white, and the counters were white. This room would have been the most boring room in the entire city, but when John looked at what was on the counters – and yes, he looked at the counters – he realized that it was scattered with pieces of broken technology.

 

And it was pretty obvious that the technology was broken, too. Several pieces were lying haphazardly across the counters, the insides exposed and several of the crystals and wires removed, half-attached.

 

“Cool.” John said.

 

-

 

“Is not weapon, is not energy source, is nothing will help us against Wraith.” Zelenka announced.

“So I can keep it?” John asked, leaning forward a bit.

  


 “Is wasting my time, out of way, yes, yes, you keep, goodbye, enjoy.” He waved his hands impatiently, and John jumped out of his way so that the cranky Czech scientist wouldn’t run him over on the way out the door.

  


“Cool.” John said, again.

                                                                                                       

He wandered around the room, picking up pieces of jumbled technology, putting them back down. The room had no windows, which was a little depressing – but this was one of those rooms that also had a large screen-like thing in the corner, which meant that once John had finished seducing Bridget, the engineer who had once been the entire AV department of her high school, he could have a television.

 

The screen flickered a bit, and then came to life. Ancient words scrolled down the screen much too quickly for him to understand, and then he told it to slow down and go back to the beginning.

 

“Huh.” John said, staring at the screen in a way that didn’t really mean “huh” and actually meant “So this is why they wanted me to learn how to read that crap.”

 

From what he could tell, it looked to be like schematic diagrams of some sort, but they were intensely complicated and everything seemed to be accompanied with paragraph-long notes.

 

John wondered if Atlantis could translate it into English for him.

 

-

 

If there was ever proof that Atlantis was sentient, alive, and totally in love with John, it was right here, in front of him. John had stumbled back from the mission, bleary and exhausted and desperate to scrub blood from his hands – he was never, ever, ever going back to M4X-992 again (Ever. Ever.) – and after his too-short shower and his too-long nap, he decided to spend the rest of his free time (he had exactly three hours and forty-seven minutes left before someone was going to demand he do something authoritative) in his own personal laboratory.

 

And when he walked in, the diagrams, schematics, and text were all written in English.

 

He practically sobbed in happiness. But he didn’t, because he wasn’t a girl. (Although, he might have wiped a single, manly tear from the corner of his not-puffy-at-all-eyes.)

 

Everybody needs a hobby, John told himself. “It’s not like you’re weird or anything.”

 

Realizing he had said that out loud, he felt vaguely embarrassed. And then he didn’t – because he was in an empty room, and if he wanted to talk to himself, nobody would know. It wasn’t as if he was crazy. After all, Atlantis loved him – fantastic choice in men she had, too – and Atlantis wouldn’t love anybody who was crazy.

 

He spent twenty minutes clearing the counter, putting all the pieces of technology off to the side and tossing everything that looked useless into a bucket in the corner. Finally, he approached the screen. “So, what am I making?” He asked Atlantis.

 

She showed him a diagram of the overall structure. It didn’t look that cool.

 

“What’s it do?” He asked.

 

The response was send directly to his brain, and John was momentarily overwhelmed with a series of complex pictures – screens of data scrolling too fast for the eye to see, jumbled bits of conversation, a puddlejumper, a MALP...

 

He blinked away the images (things couldn’t actually be burned to your corneas, could they? That was just an urban legend, right?) and shrugged. Picture of a puddlejumper, that was cool, puddlejumpers were cool, anything like a puddlejumper was cool, so he was totally putting this thing back together.

 

Atlantis hummed happily.

 

-

 

Two weeks later, John had been carefully following the schematics in front of him – Atlantis was like the best kind of girlfriend, she just left everything he’d need within easy reach, and then recede into the background – and right after he’d fit in a particularly tiny crystal into just the right slot, a voice jumped into the previously silent room.

 

“TOTAL MORON.”

 

John became very, very still, because while talking to yourself – or a city – was a slightly eccentric but not totally crazy thing to do, hearing voices WAS crazy.

 

“Huh.” The voice said, sounding surprised. “You can hear me, right?”

 

John told himself that once you responded to the voices in your head, that there was no going back. He stayed silent.

 

“Oh, dammit. It figures you’d even mess that up. Do you have any idea how long it took me to convince Atlantis to give you the voice simulator to work on, first? That’s delicate equipment, right there, and of course you don’t have a single competent person here to fix me. No, instead, you all just ignore me, as if I’m nothing because I’m not a god damn energy source. Stupid, stupid humans. Oh, oh, oh! Tell that grubby ape to get his hands off that crystal!”

 

John closed his eyes. He was hearing voices. Voices that didn’t like him.

 

“No, no… don’t touch that, crazy woman. Atlantis, can’t you unplug me from this thing?”

 

John blinked. “Do you ever stop talking?” He asked the voice.

 

“Oh, you can hear me. Thank god you can hear me. Why didn’t you say anything sooner? Are all of you people stupid? Atlantis has been trying to contact you for like, weeks. Also? Tell that long-haired freak with the spectacles that he should stay away from the KT-63 crystal in the transporter, or he’s going to get electrocuted.”

 

While John may have been crazy – and hearing voices, yes, that was definitely a sign he was crazy, when he left he was going directly to Heightmeyer’s office – he did not, in fact, know what a KT-63 crystal was. He did, however, know that Kavanaugh was working on a transporter on level two.

 

He tapped his comm. “Uh, Kavanaugh?” He said, his voice sounding kind of rough. “Message from… Whatsisname, Zepenka? He said that you should stay away from the KT-63 crystal. Something about electrocution, but I didn’t catch it.”

 

Kavanaugh snorted derisively, and John hoped he touched the goddamn KT-63 crystal, just to be contrary. Would have served him right, after the bullshit way he’d treated the marines on their last mission.

 

“Thank you.” The voice said, sounding relieved.

 

“You’re welcome.” John said, letting go of his comm.

 

-

 

“Is there any reason you think you should be hearing voices?” Kate Heightmeyer asked.

 

“It isn’t that I should be,” John tried to explain. “It’s that I am. And I shouldn’t be. That’s the problem. Hearing voices makes you crazy, right? Does this mean I qualify for more down time?”

 

“What were the voices telling you to do?” She asked, tapping her pen against her chin thoughtfully.

 

She was kind of pretty.

 

“Uh… first, it told me to tell… someone… not to touch a crystal.”

 

Kate nodded understandingly. “And then?”

 

“Then it said that if Kavanaugh touched the KT-63 crystal in the transporter console, he’d be electrocuted.” John said.

She blinked. “Just the one voice, right, John? And it said that, specifically?”

 

“Yup.” John hoped he got more down time for being crazy. They couldn’t take him off active duty – it was the Pegasus Galaxy, even crazy people had jobs – but maybe it would be nice to get weekends off again. He liked weekends.

 

“I don’t think you’re crazy at all.” She waved a hand at him. “I’ll recommend you get more down time, but I’m also going to recommend that you take one of the engineers down to your…”

 

“Garage.” John supplied helpfully.

 

She raised an eyebrow.

 

“When I was a kid, it was cars. Then, motorcycles. Then, hovercraft.” John told her. “My hobbies tend to… come together… in a garage.”

 

“Right.” She said, making a note. “Take Dr. Kusanagi with you to your Garage. I don’t think you’re crazy for hearing a voice.”

 

Jumping up from the couch, John exited the room. He stopped in the hallway outside, and then jogged back. “Why not?” he asked.

 

“Because I had to talk to some of the scientists, yesterday.” Kate replied, still sitting on her comfortable chair. “And a few of them expressed their concern about being electrocuted by accidentally touching the KT-63 crystal.”

 

He shrugged and went to find Dr… whatsername.

 

-

 

“Oh, hey! You came back. Who are you?” The voice exclaimed and demanded when John stepped back in the room.

 

The tiny physicist/engineer (Her name was Miko. John already forgot her surname, so he was gonna call her Dr. Miko from now on) squeaked and jumped back. “Oh.” She said, quietly, scrolling though the schematics.

 

John started. “You hear it, too?”

 

“Of course she hears me. I’m not a hallucination.” The voice said, sounding hurt. “I’m… wait, no, I must you small words for your puny minds to comprehend my meaning. I am a very advanced artificial intelligence.”

 

“Cool.” John said. “My name’s John.”

 

“That’s nice, John.” The voice said, sounding fairly cheerful. “I don’t have a name.”

 

“I think we should call him Rodney.” Dr. Miko said, staring starry-eyed at the Ancient designs.

-


End file.
